5 Chinese nanos are here.

SMIC, a major Chinese chip company, has announced that it has successfully completed mass production of 5 nm or SMIC N + 3 chips. Most interestingly, it is made without relying on the banned EUV, but using advanced techniques on the Deep Ultraviolet.

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which TechInsights has confirmed through the dissecting of the latest Huawei Kirin 9030 SoC chip found in the Mate 80 family of smartphones to have actually been manufactured with this N + 3 technology, a significant step forward in China's move a step closer to its semiconductor self-reliance goal.

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Technically, producing such a small chip with a DUV machine is considered extremely challenging. Since a DUV machine has a wavelength of 193 nm, which is significantly wider than an EUV machine with only 13.5 nm of light waves, SMIC requires a technique called Multi-patterning or multiple pattern reprinting.

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Includes the use of the SAQP (Self-Aligned Quadruple Patterning) process and design refinement in conjunction with manufacturing (DTCO) to compress the size of the circuit as small as possible; even these techniques allow chips with higher transistor densities to be produced.

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But experts view the N + 3 node as a positive implementation of the original 7-nanometer technology (Scaled Extension) rather than a leap into the full-body 5-nanometer technology that TSMC or Samsung did.

However, this breakthrough was at the expense of enormous costs and productivity barriers, as the techniques used to manufacture the chip as a repeated circuit pattern milling multiple cycles until the desired size was achieved, causing higher faults, resulting in a very low Yield of the chip.

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Analysts predict that the Kirin 9030 chip will likely be produced under business "loss-making" conditions, with many chips having to be scrapped or reduced to specs for use in other models, but for China this is a worthwhile investment in exchange for technological advances and the construction of a long-term self-reliant ecosystem amid Western technology blocking.

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Source: tomshardware

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